One minor aspect of having multiple children when you’re interested in genetics is that you get to “run your own experiment”, so to speak. The above image is a screenshot of 23andMe’s Genome View feature, which basically allows you to compare your genome with relatives. Above you see the comparison of the autosomal genome of my son and my daughter. They’re full siblings. So the expectation of their relatedness in terms of identity by descent is 0.50. The reality is that it’s 0.53. They’re a little more related than the expected value. But a simple summary isn’t that interesting. What’s obvious above is that across long regions of the genome my children are identical twins. In other regions of the genome they’re half identical. Finally, there are segments where they aren’t related all. If you are a bit confused how that could be, imagine that my daughter inherits segments from her maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather, while my son inherits segments from his paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather.
It’s called life in the 21st century.
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